Walter Mosley is a wonder of the world. A writer of prodigious output, he runs at least three mystery series, plus he writes a crazily eclectic mix of other fiction (and some nonfiction as well). He is still most famous for his Easy Rawlins series, about a black private eye in Watts during the 1950s (you might recall the movie Devil in a Blue Dress).
The Right Mistake: The Further Philosophical Investigations of Socrates Fortlow is the third in what I consider to be Mosley’s most original, powerful series. It stars (if that’s the right word) Socrates Fortlow, a mountain of a man who has spent most of his life in prison for brutal rape and murder. In Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned and Walkin’ the Dog, the author traversed the early, taut days of Fortlow’s release and uneasy rehabilitation into society. Structured as seamlessly linked short stories, both books shone out as tense moral fables (our protagonist’s first name is no accident, as Mosley shows by his subtitle). Now, a decade later, Mosley has put out The Right Mistake, another batch of stories that take Fortlow into strange fictional territory.
Socrates now has a job and a house. But a strange conjunction of events grants him a house in which to unveil an unusual vision for a stone killer: a place where LA citizens of every hue and religion meet to eat and discuss bedrock issues. Like the other crime fiction books I’ve read this month, Mosley uses the genre rather than fits into it, but he doesn’t forego tension and violence, not at all. Violence rears up, the police hound Socrates, and sudden love threatens to derail him. The author’s style is his usual mixture of terseness, poetic phrases and keen observation of detail. Mosley’s dialogue is to die for.
If you’re a crime fiction fan, and even more if you’re not, go buy and savour.